We hardly needed any additional evidence that Donald Trump's "policy" choices are primarily spite-based, but we have another. A week ago, the Daily Mail reported on leaked memos from the United Kingdom's then-ambassador Kim Darroch to officials back home. Darroch's (extremely correct) evaluation of Trump as "inept," "insecure," "incompetent." and leading a "dysfunctional" administration pursuing "incoherent" policies naturally sent Captain Tantrum into one of his signature meltdowns, declaring that "we will no longer deal with" Darroch, who soon resigned his post.
But the Mail is now reporting the contents of additional memos, these centering around the last-ditch efforts of Darroch and the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, to persuade Trump to abide by the Iran nuclear agreement. Darroch describes Trump's move as "diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons—it was Obama's deal."
It was the estimation of the top British diplomats, after their own meetings with Trump's team, that Donald Trump was sabotaging international efforts to limit Iranian nuclear programs because he could not stand that Obama had done it.
This is not new information. But Darroch's write-up of the British meeting with Trump's top team, national security adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Vice President Mike Pence, is informative because it relays a remarkable nonchalance by Trump's top sycophants in justifying Trump's tantrum-based demands to erase the previous deal, regardless of consequences. As reported by the Mail, Darroch wrote that "None of the three could articulate why the President was determined to withdraw, beyond his campaign promises. And, even when you pressed, none had anything much to say about the day after, or a Plan B, beyond reimposition of US sanctions."
Darroch also wrote specifically of Mike Pence's (characteristically groveling) justifications of Trump's spite-fueled "policy." "This is not about walking away, it's about walking to something better," Pence told Johnson—a particularly vapid bit of rhetoric from the White House's most strenuously vapid official. It might have been more compelling if Pence or the others could describe to the British diplomats any plan to arrive at that "something better"; that they were unable to suggests that none of the three believed, despite the immense foreign policy ramifications, that he needed to.
So it is Darroch's inner view into the abject complacency of Trump's top officers in supporting Trump's reflexive acts of spite and belligerence that is perhaps the most compelling. That Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist whose daily acts revolve solely around self-gratification and self-promotion is at this point so well-known that it will become history's defining narrative of the man. None of it would be possible, however, if he had not assembled a team of groveling yes-men willing not just to abide, but to defend and implement the man's most destructive demands. He had to reach not very far at all into the Republican Party bag to find such conscienceless bootlickers, either.